Prenzlau, on 20 August 2018 - 03:47 PM, said:
There are only a handful of players who have mastered the RB-17 to the point were they can consistently produce devastating results via low flying tactics. This effect is even more magnified when battles are 80-90% bots. You are quite right in your observation that battles with only a few humans per side often creates imbalance and when you throw in the game's chaotic attempts to rig bots, it can be like a slot machine.
If flying the RB-17 or any other bomber for that matter was a piece of cake, and getting the mega results, then everyone would be doing it and the battles would be filled with human bombers. This is not the case and the vast majority of human bombers are mediocre or worse. I've flown thousands of battles, and I know who the good ones are and notice the level of competence in whom ever I come across.
As a whole, and I have said this many times, it is not really fair to evaluate planes as "over powered" when the environment is mostly bots and at times the human element is very minimum. In these environments, any greatly skilled human will stand out, in any type of plane. If there were regular battles containing 12-15 humans per side, then it would become very clear that the planes are not as "over powered" as they appear to be. The fact that we do not have regular battles containing majorities of human players is the fault of WG for not producing, promoting, managing, and designing a product that is appealing to large amounts of human players.
In all fairness to the RB-17, I regularly fly the Do 217M, A-26B, Ju 88A, Do 17 Z, and Blenheim IV and get great results and many victories. Eventually, people have to come to the logical path that leads to certain players simply being great in certain planes. Time and time again we look at the plane, or the game for explanations, and don't take into account the full impact of player skill.
Thanks for your insight and observations.
Prenzlau
Well I think we might be having the wrong conversation here. I completely understand the importance of player skill in the ability of the RB-17 to influence games. The number of times I have seen human GAs and Bombers with 50k damage + and 1 ground kill...

That being said, this game has been produced and balanced around having human teams of all types of aircraft, enabling each to perform their different roles. When there's only 1-3 humans per side which is usual at higher tiers this can't happen. The game in 2.0 ultimately revolves around controlling caps, and flipping them is something the RB-17 excels at and was designed to do. The game in its current state favors excellence at ground pounding. If you take players of equally advanced skill in the Rb-17 (and I have to say, some others including the A-26, at least pre-2.0.5 when i saw more of them), the Rb-17 will pretty reliably be able to win in the game in its current state. This is the reason why I'm not exactly overjoyed at the announcement of the addition of the new bombers into the game. Could they not have taken that money and tried to get more people into the game first?
As to whether the specific plane is OP or now, I'm not sure we can actually tell either, given the low population and the fact that most people playing this game have absolutely no idea what they're doing (whether they've played a lot or not, and have good stats or bad).
Edited by Xr901, 20 August 2018 - 05:00 PM.